FO Jollyfish!

Here it is! Finally. He likes it a lot. The duplicate stitch was fun to do. Took it to the knit-in and some of the ladies thought it was neat. Love the chart, thanks again to knittingjuju!

Again with the Jollyfish...

I finished the knitting part of my hat. I started the duplicate stitch and I think I'm happy about the decision to do the duplicate stitch instead of fair isle or intarsia in the round. It looks neat this way. I hope it isn't too small, I hope I didn't start the decrease too early just because I was impatient. The boy will be home soon, I do know that it was comfortable around. And I have a lot of colors of this yarn, it's a Plymouth yarn. Sport weight. Now I know my gauge in the round on it, and I like the way it looks on the 1's. There are probably a lot of fair isle gloves in my future using this yarn. Only down side is the dark color was hard to see any mistakes, and any gloves I make will probably be in darker colors for the guys. Even the duplicate stitch is a bit difficult unless the light is shining right on it.

Slowly gaining

I'm back at the Jollyfish hat. I'm at around 20% done. My youngest is really sick at the moment, feverish, so I'm staying nearby. Good knitting opportunity. He's the kind of kid who's 100% on when he's awake and dead to the world when he falls asleep, so things are way too quiet when he is sick. It started yesterday, Saturday, and he may end up home tomorrow too. He's not appearing better yet at all.

Ribbit!

Note my progress on the Jollyfish Hat has gone back to 0%. I frogged the whole thing because I really need to add another 20 or so stitches around. It just fits my youngest and next year won't fit anyone. He was trying it on for me and he says "just add some more over here". Yeah. So out it comes. I love the feel of the sport wight I'm using for it, and I'm on 1's. All my guys like the small gauge stuff, of course. I do too though really. I took a poll at the shop of who would think it was cheating to do the Jollyfish chart on the hat in duplicate stitch. I think so, but everyone else was being nice. It's just that the fish only goes half way around and I don't want to carry the white the rest of the way around. I tried the intarsia in the round last night and I ended up having so many really long floats to deal with as I worked it that it was a lot to fool with. Plus try trying to keep my mind around which row I was on... So duplicate stitch is another option. I should ask Juli Ridl what she thinks since it's her pattern. For now I'm back to the start. Oh well, I can listen to Prairie Home Companion tonight, and my britcoms are on.

Intarsia in the round

I ran across a wonderful tutorial at Moth Heaven for doing intarsia in the round. Please check it out, I am using it on my Jollyfish Hat. I am having to go back and re-read the steps, it's not all that intuitive to me, but how wonderful to not have to carry and twist 2 threads behind the entire hat. She does explain that it is a bit "fiddly", but sometimes keeping track of the tension of floats doesn't work well either. And duplicate stitch is ok, but not really a challenge for me.

Jollyfish hat

I found a hat on ravelry using this chart, and can't wait to get it done up into a basic cap for the boys. It's from Juli Ridl, you can find her and her chart and pics at http://knittingjuju.wordpress.com/
Now why can't I come up with something original and cool like this?